The American Gaming Association just wants to bring like-minded people — and organizations — together for the purpose of advancing the gaming industry to new heights.

Following what the AGA calls a significant shift in its membership and governance structure, the organization is now welcoming five new board members this week: The Cordish Company, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Global Cash Access, Novomatic and Vantiv Gaming Solutions.

The AGA, we’re told, also added six general members: Casino City Press, Fantini Research, FPL Advisory Group, Ho-Chunk Gaming, Ortiz Gaming and YWS Design & Architecture.Read the full story

The team at Ladbrokes is showing the mobile casino industry how to make an app that’s both popular and practical.

This week, Ladbrokes rolled out a new mobile casino app for iOS. The app in question not only serves up a familiar array of visually aesthetic features, but more mobile-centric notification features and resources.

“The new app also offers push notifications and promotions that are segmented according to a certain customer’s gaming preferences and behavior,” iGamingBusiness reports after their first look at the app.Read the full story

“Spirit Mountain will replace a competitor’s systems with the Bally SDS slot management system, which will be deployed across 250 slot machines to manage casino, slot, and hospitality data,” reads a provided statement.

SDS provides what the statement calls crucial game-monitoring data in real-time and fully integrates with other systems including the Bally CMP player-tracking system, which the casino also will utilize.Read the full story

Only a decade ago, casinos were viewed as the one-size-fits-all guaranteed antidote to declining state revenues. One by one, many states dismantled laws on the books that prohibited casinos altogether, or just land-based casinos, or some variation of the above.

The push to say yes to casinos was financial. Gambling — whether casinos or lottery ticket operations — have loomed large on the list of ways states have tried to grease the money machine.

But it’s not working. Or at least, not as well as most projections and advance business plans posit.

This week, Plaor, Inc., a social casino operator owned by CrowdGather, announced the sequel to its popular and successful social casino tournament series, Party With the Stars.

If you’re not familiar, the tournament includes an array of innovative features in honor of Presidents Day (e.g., themed virtual table gifts which will be given out by the event’s many celebrity participants).

Offered to players of Mega Fame Casino & Slots, Party With the Stars: Presidents Day Edition is basically a social poker tournament series running between February 16-19 in Mega Fame Casino & Slots from 5PM-8PM PST.

According to a statement provided to mGamingWatch, celebrities will be playing high stakes poker tables and poker shootouts with special challenges active each day of the event for players to participate in.

While a handful of states rushed to launch online gambling as soon as it was legal to do so in the United States, several more states have taken their time to weigh the pros and cons. As an added benefit of this protracted period of contemplation, states have had the time to learn from the areas of opportunity of the first few states to legalize online gambling (Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey) and search for proposed solutions.

More than a handful of states have been talking about introducing an online gambling bill, but at least three are actively taking the bold plunge in 2015—California, Mississippi, and Washington State. While lawmakers in these 3 states have now introduced online gambling-related bills, it is expected that New York State will soon do the same (reports Bluff), with Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Illinois likely to follow suit shortly thereafter.

“iGaming is rapidly becoming one of the largest if not the largest online business today,” says OnlineCasinoReports. “Combining technology with protective programming, the iGaming industry in many ways represents the state of the art in adapting an industry to the web.”

Now comes word that the “Social and Mobile Gambling Conference,” to be held in Moscow on March 19, 2015 could be a game changer for many purveyors of online gaming offering. It’s the first mobile and social network gambling event ever in the Russian Federation.